Top Ten Reasons NOT To Be A Screenwriter

Screenwriting sucks. It is a brutal occupation. You get crapped on all the time. But I wouldn’t change jobs for a million dollars... I love writing screenplays. So, here we are with more answers to those questions you posted a few month ago...

Question: Can you give us some reasons *WHY NOT* To Write A Screenplay?

I'll start:

1. How to write a Feature Film Script is *elusive*. Unless (of course) you are a glutton for continuous mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical pain…

Answer: Have I ever said it was easy?

2. It's almost impossible to sell a script. There are around half a million scripts in circulation ever year, and a couple hundred films made.

3. Oh, and once you sell or option a script - almost impossible to get it made.

4. And once they make it, they screw it up so bad it doesn't resemble what you wrote.

5. And critics will blame *you* for all of the bad parts, even though all of that stuff was their stupid rewrite.

6. And, as I've said before, if you were to just focus on a day job and work really hard - you'll probably make about as much (if not more) than you will writing scripts. With less hassle and more peace of mind.

7. David E. Kelley is the exception that proves really hot actors/actresses do not sleep with screenwriters.

8. The minute you sell a script and they completely ruin it, someone comes out of the woodwork saying they would have bought it and made it as written.

9. But if you sell a script for less money to someone who says they won't change a word - when they are done, they will point out that *one* word they didn't change.

10. And once you’ve gone through the seven circles of Hell required to sell a screenplay? You are unemployed... and must return to GO and begin the whole process again... Then again... Then again... Then again...

But Wait! There's More!

This is a brutal, difficult business. Someone once said that you can make a fortune writing screenplays, but you can’t make a living. That’s not entirely true, but the point is that when you read about some writer making a lot of money, those are the very very few at the top of the food chain. Every year, half of the WGA membership makes $0 (zero, zed, nothing)... and the median for the other half is around $100k. So, you can kind of plan on making $50k a year as a professional screenwriter - and that isn’t much. Of course, some people make more money... which means others have to make less money. And some people go a couple of years without work, so that others can work every year. There is no regular paycheck, and every time you sell a screenplay... it may be your last. You don’t know. Or, maybe this is the sale that will be made into the hit film that will change your career. You never know.

I just finished the rewrites on movie #20, and now I’m unemployed (I'm good 'til the end of the year, but what about next year?). So I’m running around trying to get someone, somewhere, to read a script and then buy it. Saturday night I had dinner with a producer... which lasted a couple of hours longer than expected... and after all of that time, do I have a job? I don’t know. We talked about potential projects, but nothing that seemed like a contract and a paycheck. May happen, may have just wasted half a day with this guy. There are a lot of time wasters out there. Lots of meetings that lead nowhere. This business has ups and downs - not all rollercoaster rides are in the cineplex. I have had years where 3 scripts were sold... and 3 films were made from them. Other years where I sold nothing and lived on savings from the previous year’s sales. I’ve also had years where I worked my butt off on a project that crashed and burned - I got paid, the film didn’t get made. There’s a stretch of time between credits on IMDB where I earned a living - they just never made any of the films. Problem is, go long enough without something going to screen and you start to go crazy. Am I doing all of this work for nothing? For a check? So that I can pay the monthly bills and at the end of the year have no new credits and no movie to watch with my name on it?

Hey, I could tell you tales of terror from the screenwriting trenches... in fact, some are coming up. The statute of limitations have expired on a couple of stories, so I’m gonna blog about them in the next few weeks... while I’m looking for work.

The amazing thing is - this is my 18th year as a pro screenwriter. I have managed to put together a living for 18 years, now. Through good and bad. You might look at my credits (or my credit reports) and think I'm a failure... I mean, look at all of those bad movies! But I think I'm a success - I am doing what I love, and have been doing it for the past 18 years. Some good years, some bad years - all *screenwriting* years.

Recently all of the “Entertainment News” shows (which rarely contain any actual entertainment news, but lots of celebrity news and scandal stuff) did a story on Anne Heche’s divorce - she’s behind on her spousal support payments and her ex dragged her into court... where she said that her TV show had been cancelled, so she is currently out of work and has no offers, and no idea when (if ever) she will be employed again. This is some sort of scandal! Broke TV star! How can that be? Well, it’s actually fairly common in the entertainment biz. No regular pay checks, no regular employment, no idea what will happen next. Live like a star, and you may end up broke before the next gig. What if you were “flavor of the month” and the month is over? What if that was it?

Because I’m often the guy with the facts and figures about just how tough the job of screenwriting is, people sometimes think I’m a pessimist... or, at the very least, some sort of spoilsport trying to destroy their dreams. Wrong on both counts. I am a *realist* - I don’t live in fantasy land, I live here in the real world, and want to know how to survive in this world. In either STAR WARS or EMPIRE, Han Solo says, “Don’t ever tell me the odds!” I think he’s a fool. If I know how difficult something is in advance, I can make sure I put in enough effort to win. I can prepare myself. I can make plans, do research, find the best method for success... Of course, Han Solo wasn’t really one for plans, so maybe knowing the odds was just unimportant to him. I want to know what problems I am likely to face *before* I have to face them - then I can come up with a solution and not just get beat down. Many people get beat down because they think their dreams will come true if they just keep on dreaming. Problem is - the real world doesn’t care about dreams. It’s hard work and problem solving.

Here’s the thing - once you know that there are going to be a million boobytraps ahead, and that there are 50,000 scripts registered every year, and probably ten year’s worth of scripts in circulation (that is half a million, folks) and that they only bought something like 98 spec scripts last year, and probably made around 10 or something, you may wonder how anyone can *not* be pessimistic... and there’s the key to being a screenwriter. You have to be an optimist. Once you know how crappy the odds are, once you know that your career could be over with one script sale, once you know that even if you have 19 films made from your scripts and they all turned out crap... you still believe you can make it. You still believe that someone, somewhere, will actually make your script the way it was written... or maybe even be a great director who will interpret your script using their directing talent (which has zip to do with writing) and the film will be better than your script. Hey, and maybe some great actor will play the lead and add their talent to your script (again - acting talent doesn’t mean changing the script, it means *performing* it). And the film becomes better than you could have imagined! And you maintain this optimism through crappy film after crappy film... through rejection after rejection. And when your hair begins to gray, you still *love* the writing part of this job. You still *love* coming up with stories and characters and going on those mental adventures for 110 pages.

I love to write. So, even if #20 was it and I end up working in McDonalds for the rest of my life, I will always have writing. I will always be able to do what I love.

Being a screenwriter is just like anything else in life. There are highs and lows. There are days when you think God hates you. Most days, though, you just wonder if He even knows you exist. A few weeks ago, I was standing outside a coffee shop, talking on my phone, surrounded by other people... and a bird shit on me. It didn’t shit on anybody else. Just me. A few months ago, I went to pick up some printing at a copy shop and they told me my credit card didn’t work. What? I called the credit card folks they told me that I had reported it stolen. What? I told them I hadn’t - and they argued with me. Eventually, I got far enough up the chain of idiots to get someone “in charge” who said a mistake must have been made and they would send me a new card... You know, it’s been one thing after another and many phone calls later I still don’t have that replacement card... I'm better off without it... and just use another card, now. Someone spilled coffee on me a few days ago. Burned my leg and stained a new pair of jeans - fresh from the laundry! Things go wrong every single day of your life - and you don’t quit, do you? You don’t give up on living because some bad things happen - because there are obstacles. Hey - same with screenwriting. I can tell you right now - you will have all kinds of problems in your screenwriting career. You will have producers back stab you, you will have agents blow deals, you will have managers cheat you, you will work your ass off on some film... and credit arbitration goes against you and your name isn’t on the film. There are a million things that will go wrong in your career as a screenwriter, just as there are a million things that will go wrong in your life. But if you love screenwriting, you’ll keep doing it....

Just make sure the producers don’t shit on you too much. And when they do, just remember there are other producers - some will probably shit on you less... and some may not shit on you at all. And, if you’re an optimist, some producer somewhere will read one of your scripts and know how good it is... and do everything in their power to turn it into a great film. I’m still waiting for that to happen, but I have faith that it will.

So, I’m working on a new spec... a family film about getting back up on your feet after life knocks you down. Inspirational. Optimistic... and also realistic. In the immortal words of Rocky Balboa, "It ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done! Now if you know what you're worth then go out and get what you're worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits."

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Bank Holiday in the USA, so it's Hero Comes Late. - but some new tips are in the works... one on IRON MAN I'm working on...
Yesterday’s Dinner: Broccoli Beef at City Wok in Studio City.

Movies: I've seen a whole bunch of movies, including the new Indiana Jones film, and will report on them in the coming days...

Movies: NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN - I thought the first NARNIA movie, THE LION THE WITH AND THE WARDROBE was just okay. When my nieces were kids I gave them all of the books to read, not so much because they were secretly Christian books as because they were books of imagination. Kids need to exercise their imaginations! They need to have an escape! When I was a kid I read all of the Edgar Rice Burroughs stuff, but those were kind of boy books - the Narnia books had girls in them, and they’d be perfect for my nieces. They called them “chapter books”. I have no idea whether they saw the movie or whether they liked it, but for me by the time LION got to the big battle scenes, they were kind of *generic* battle scenes - and I didn’t care.

So, maybe they figured all of that out in the sequel?

Nope! PRINCE CASPIAN is bland and boring and impersonal... and also completely non-Christian... not that that matters to me, I haven’t set foot in a church in decades, but you’d think it would matter to the guys making the film. That is part of their audience, right? I mean, the reason why SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES died was because it was the non-Christian fantasy film, right?

LION has a great opening scene - Nazi planes are bombing London in WW2 and our 4 kids are racing to the bomb shelter, when one of the boys races back inside the house... the very house that is about to be bombed! The other kids *order him* not to go, but he does anyway. Bombs are destroying homes. People are being killed out there. It’s an exciting, suspense filled action scene. This is a kid with problems.... and when he gets back into the bomb shelter we find out what was so important to him... a photo of his dead soldier father. Okay, that is a great scene because it’s all about character - and it’s also exciting and involving.

CASPIAN begins with a fist fight between boys - and we don’t know what started it or even who these kids are. Our two lead boys end up involved in the fight in the subway (tube), but we don’t know what it is all about... meanwhile some geeky kid is hitting on the oldest girl, and she tries to get away from him. That’s when the subway train comes... and the four kids see Narnia. They are transported to Narnia...

That isn’t nearly as cool as the hide & seek from the first film. No magic.

Once they get there, they discover a whole bunch of time has passed in Narnia, that runs on some sort of dog-year time or something. Narnia has been taken over by a bunch of evil humans who have killed all of the cute talking animals (can’t really say I blame them) and killed all of the weird half-man/half-horse things that have 6 appendages and may or may not have 2 sets of genitals (again - can’t say I blame them - those things freaked me out in the first film). There is an evil king, of course, and he has this evil plan to build a wooden bridge over this river. Much like Darth Vader, he kills people who get behind schedule... so I’m thinking this is the Death Bridge. No one ever tells us why this bridge is so important, or what the king;s evil plan might be... so we just watch guys build a bridge and don’t really care. It’s not like they are going to use the bridge to destroy a planet or something - it’s just a freakin’ bridge! So we don’t care.

When the evil king’s wife pops a boy, Prince Caspian is in the way of his evil bridge building plan, so he decides to kill him... but Caspian escapes, because the film is named after him. The film isn’t called Narnia: Cute Talking Badger.

Caspian does bump into some cute talking animals and some dwarves and our four kids, who are all legendary kings in the world of Narnia. Though the evil king and his bridge building henchmen think all of the damned talking animals and dwarves in Narnia are dead, seems that some survived and are living in the woods. Now here is where being a writer means I make sense of a story that really doesn’t make sense in order to explain it to you - the talking animals basically hide all day because they have no one to lead them into battle with the humans. That isn’t in the movie at all, but it should have been. And, though not a single talking animal ever mentions Aslan the Lion from the first film, who was secretly Jesus, it seems they need some Lion guidance. Again, I’m making sense of the movie and adding that the animals have lost faith, when that is never mentioned, shown, alluded to, hinted at, or anything else in that actual film. It’s as if all of the important stuff in the story never made it into the script - it just stayed in Adamson’s mind.

The talking animals and Prince Caspian, who speaks with Chico Marx’s accent, want the four kid kings to help them - even though this is barely discussed. This is a movie where things happen in the most boring and unemotional way possible - as if it’s designed to put you to sleep. It never tries to include us in the story or involve us in any way... and none of the characters have any emotional conflicts at all ... so there is nothing to feel. They decide to attack the evil king in his castle - because they’d never expect that - and we get a big, pointless battle scene.

Now, I’ve said this in a dozen Script Tips - an action scene is a *character* scene. In one of those danged LORD OF THE RINGS movies, there’s this great battle scene where one of the King-guy’s daughters, played by Miranda Otto (didn’t even have to look that up) is in love with Viggo Mortensen’s character. When all of the soldiers put on their armor and go into battle, she dons armor and tries to blend with the others. One of the short guys - I think the one on LOST - sees that this soldier is a woman... the Princess. Will he keep her secret? That adds an element of suspense, along with just the basic concept that this is the *Princess* in the battle, not a soldier. Of course, the biggest, meanest, most evil monster-soldier of all kills his way to her. Now she is fighting the ultimate warrior... and we know it’s the Princess, not a soldier! The ultimate warrior thing fights her - and it’s one heck of a great fight, but she’s completely out-gunned. This ultimate warrior thing gets ready to kill her, and says, “No man can kill me.” And she does an absolutely amazing sword move and kills the sucker, then takes off her helmet, lets down her hair, and says, “I am no man.” That’s a freakin’ great moment in a huge battle scene! And that is only one moment out of *dozens* in that one battle scene. That’s the key to a great epic battle scene - it’s all about individual fights within the battle, and the amazing emotional moments in those fights. But with CASPIAN we just get this big battle - lots of long shots of fighting, but no *moments*. These are the most boring film fights since the last Narnia movie!

Oh, and Tilda Swinton pops up in a one minute cameo as the evil ice queen... which brings up character arcs and emotional conflicts. Even though the battle scenes were boring in the first film, the film was still okay because of the characters. The problem boy from the first film was lured to the dark side by the Ice Queen, and a major part of that first film was the battle for that boy’s soul. Here, no one is even tempted! None of the four kids has any emotional issues they are struggling with at all - that makes them boring. They are flawless - and characterless. Maybe they thought after the kids found Lion in the first film they had to be perfect... but that just makes them boring. No weakness means no strength. You can’t get up if you have never fallen.

Okay, once they have retreated from one pointless battle scene and fallen back to their crumbling hide out in the woods, the evil King decides to follow them and kill them all. All cute talking animals and half horse / half men will be destroyed! And you know how they get to the Narnian hide out? You guessed it - the Death Bridge! This makes no sense at all, because they thought there were no more talking animals, so why would they build the Death Bridge over the part of the river that leads right to their hide out? I mean, they’d have to have flipped to the end of the script to find out where the hide out would be (it wasn’t a hide out until there was a reason to hide out) so this makes no sense at all - just really really bad writing. The writer may know what comes next, but the characters don’t. And in this case, the evil King is building the bridge before they discover that there are still cute talking animals and before our Kid Kings return.

Eventually the evil King and his army cross the Death Bridge and we get to another big pointless battle scene - with no character and no drama and no moments in between - this film is flat and boring and long. For some reason which they do not tell us, they send the youngest girl, Lucy, on horseback into the forest. Oh, and there are bad guy soldiers in the forest. Why is she riding in the forest? What the hell is this all about? Instead of letting us in on the story, so that we can worry that she won’t accomplish her mission in time or whatever, we’re kept completely outside the story - and have no idea what the heck is going on. They keep cutting back to Lucy evading the soldiers, and we wonder why they sent a little girl out into the woods in the first place. Are they trying to get her killed? Did she piss off her brothers and sister and they want her to die?

Instead of including us in the story, the film excludes us and confuses us.

And we don’t care.

By the way, the one thing I still don’t understand about these epic boring bloody battle scenes - are they really in the spirit of being Christian? Instead of bloody battles where people are brutally killed, shouldn’t we be turning the other cheek? Shouldn’t we be finding some sort of peaceful answer? Should we be teaching our kids that when people have a different opinion than yours, you should kill them? There’s a moment in the film where a character can be forgiving or use their sword... and we don’t end up with a very Christian solution to the fight. The good Christian character lifts his sword to kill the bad guy, hesitates... then hands the sword to another character and says: You kill him! Like I said, I haven’t set foot in a church in decades, but I believe that you always have to do what is right - and that isn’t the message in this film. At the end of the day, this film is about brutally killing people. I don’t think I want my now-adult nieces to see this film... and I worry about the kids in the audience. There are more moral discussions and more moral actions in the LORD OF THE RINGS movies than in these supposedly Christian films. The scene in, I think the second LOTR movie, where Frodo and Sam are suspicious of each other... and eventually they must make peace with each other and forgive each other.... that’s a good message. The LOTR movies are about throwing away the most precious thing in the world so that the world can be at peace. You know, when people are killing each other over *oil*, maybe we need to skip the next NARNIA movie and re-see those LOTR flicks. Plus, they’re much much better movies.

Pages: Kinda goofed off for a few days after the rewrite, but now I'm working on the girl-horse project... and kind a poking around on the Big Rewrite Project.

Bicycle: Raining and overcast in LA - so I haven't been on the bike over the long holiday weekend.

- Bill

My Accidental Movie Cameo

A couple of weeks ago I did an entry on my friend Danny’s short film CHILDREN OF SCUM: A RETROSPECTIVE that was playing at L.A.’s Mockfest. Even though I was cut out of SCUM, I planned on going to the screening just to lend my immoral support... but something happened and I missed it. Actually, I had a terrible day in 100' plus heat where I (like an idiot) cycled to a Starbucks I’ve only been in once before to work only to discover that their A/C was broken... and by the time I’d done a little work and cycled home, I was miserable and overheated and sunburned...

But even though I wasn’t there in SCUM and I wasn’t there in person, I *was* at Mockfest...

In another movie...

One I had no idea I was in...

Thanks to Danny for giving me the heads up about my cameo in DESPERATELY SEEKING PAUL McCARTNEY. They filmed me at a pitch clinic put on by Alameda Writers Group, where I was on the panel dispensing advice to people pitching their projects. I remember being on the panel, I have no memory of cameras in the room. But they had to be there, because I’m in the film telling this woman that the main problem with her doc about marrying Paul McCartney is that it requires Paul McCartney... and he may be difficult to get hold of.

When I tracked down the film, I found the trailer... and I’m in it! (Blink and you'll miss me - I guess in the film I have dialogue.)



Strange! Where will I turn up next? TMZ?

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:

Pages: Finished the rewrite, delivered it to the director.
Bicycle: Riding today - not really adding to my distance, but maintaining it.

Indiana Jones And The Half Dozen Screenwriters

Hey, I have tickets for the new Indiana Jones movie Friday night... I can't wait!

But what the heck am I gonna see?

I bought the new DVD of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK with all kinds of extras...including a new doc that has everyone talking about how great Larry Kasdan's script was. Spielberg says they had this meeting with Kasdan that took the basic concept and turned it into something great... and then the screenplay he delivered was even better. If you managed to miss who Kasdan is, he's one of the great screenwriters of our time. He wrote RAIDERS and EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and BODY HEAT and RETURN OF THE JEDI and BIG CHILL and SILVERADO and GRAND CANYON and CONTENTAL DIVIDE (great film - John Belushi) and THE BODYGUARD and others. But not a single frame of the doc shows Kasdan - he isn't interviewed, he isn't shown.

Kind of a mixed message, there. The script was great, Larry Kadan is a great writer... but we didn't think he was important enough to be on the doc about the movie he wrote. The invisible screenwriter.

The reason why it has taken 19 years for a sequel is always said to be finding the right screenplay. After THE LAST CRUSADE, the screenwriter of that movie (Jeffrey Boam who also brought the LETHAL WEAPON series back to life) wrote a screenplay that everyone except Lucas liked. Since then, Tom Stoppard and Steve Gaghan (TRAFFIC) did drafts that were rejected... and then it was given to Frank Darabont (SHAWSHANK) who was one of the writers on YOUNG INDIANA JONES. When I met Darabont many years ago, in the house where he was living up in the Holywood Hills, he showed me the brand new car he bought with Young Indy money. He wrote a draft of INDY 4 that Spielberg loved and Ford loved... and Lucas rejected. Drabont was kind of vocal about it - you can Google it, and find his complete tirade. Then a draft was written by M. Night Shamalamadingdong... probably with a twist ending. That draft was also rejected. I'm sure I left someone out - every hot writer has done a draft - some were rejected by all, some were only rejected by Lucas. Finally they found a script they all agreed on by David Koepp.

Koepp is kind of the go-to guy for big blockbusters - like WAR OF THE WORLDS and JURASSIC PARK. I'm a fan of his early thrillers (APARTMENT ZERO, BAD INFLUENCE, etc), and even like the stuff he's been writing & directing lately (his great little film TRIGGER EFFECT may end up the better version of Shamalamadingdong's HAPPENING film). I saw him on a panel once, and he talked about writing big films - often the director gives you a list of scenes and your job is to run a story through them. This means he probably took dictation from Spielberg and/or Lucas... hell, maybe even Ford. So Lucas gets *exactly* the script he wants...

And is that a good thing? I mean, look at the three STAR WARS prequels. Is that what I'm gonna see on Friday night? Indiana Jones meets Jar Jar Binks?

They always do director's cuts - you know, where Lucas screws up his old movies - but I'd really like to see the Writer's Cut - the Darabont version, the Night version, the Boam version, etc. Would those movies be better? Different? More interesting? Less Jar Jar?

Wouldn't it be cool to have all of these scripts on the DVD when it comes out?

What do you think the new movie is going to be like? Better than LAST CRUSADE? Worse than that awful second film?

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Mixed Genre Salad and my 20th film.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Chicken Ceasar salad at Fuddruckers.

Movies: THE VISITOR - I was fan of STATION AGENT when it came out, so I had to see the writer-director's new movie. Character actor Richard Jenkins plays a very uptight college prof who is practically forced to give a presentation in New York. When he arrives at his unusued NYC apartment... there are fresh flowers on the table. Someone's belongings in the living room. Someone is squatting in his empty apartment. Then he hears a noise from the bathroom - someone in the tub! Ends up a young immigrant couple have been living there - and they think *he's* the intruder. Once he proves it's his apartment, the couple agrees to leave... but when he sees them on the street he decides to let them stay temporarily. Until they can find a place to stay.

The woman (Zainab) is from Senegal, the man (Tarek) from Syria. She makes jewelry, he plays the bongos in several night clubs. Completely different than Jenkins' stuffy college prof.

The movie opens with Jenkins taking piano lessons, and not doing well. So we know he has some interest in music. He also has many CDs of a female pianist playing classical music. When Jenkins comes back from his event to find Tarek playing his bongos in the living room, he's interested in the music. They may be reluctant roommates, but they have music in common. Tarek offers to teach Jenkins how to play the bongos, and it's funny to watch the stuffy guy playing a wild instrument.

McCarthy's STATION AGENT was about accidental relationships, and so is this film. Though Jenkins has nothing in common with Tarek, they bond over the drums... and a scene where Tarek takes Jenkins to play in the park with a few dozen other bongo players is a high point of the film. But just when you think the story will be about a closed off man learning to losen up and the healing power of music, the story takes a major twist... and nothing is the same.

One of the things I loved about this film were the small moments - Jenkins delivers a letter from Zainab to Tarek at one point, and turns away as he reads it to give him privacy. Tarek's mother prepares dinner, and measures salt into her hand. Little bits of reality and character. There's even a nice little reveal about why Jenkins is taking piano lessons (the story may seem like McCarthy is making it up as he goes along, that life is just playing out; but in reality this is a carefully constructed script where some minor thing early in the film plays off later).

This is a nice little art house film, that takes a stuffy upper-middle class college professor and immerses him into a world of immigrants trying to make it in America.

- Bill

The Big Rewrite Project

A couple of days ago I finished an old spec script.

Well, finished it for the second time.

I’ve mentioned this before, but one of my ongoing projects is to do page one rewrites on a bunch of old specs I have sitting around. I’ve probably written close to a hundred scripts - and many of them suck. Or, at least, don’t work. When I was working the day job, I wrote one good page every day, and that translates to 3 screenplays a year... and over ten years that’s 30 scripts. Now add in all of the scripts I’ve written since moving to Los Angeles almost 20 years ago, and subtract the ones that sold, and I have a huge stack of scripts. Some of them are great, some of them are not great. But all of them are *mine*, and just like I do a clean-up rewrite on the ones that work every few years (to add cell phones or Blackberrys and subtract PanAm Airlines and companies and devices that are no longer with us), I want to see if I can figure out how to make the bad scripts good.

Some just need a fresh coat of paint. Some need a remodel. Some need an addition. Many need to be bulldozed and rebuilt from the foundation up.

There are different reasons why these screenplays don’t work. Often there’s some story issue that I couldn’t crack, and I hope as time passes I’ll figure it out. This month I was supposed to be doing a page one rewrite on my DEAD RUN script, which has a weird history. I pitched the story to a producer who was about to do a slate of 5 theatricals for a respected mini-major. He loved it, and it was part of the slate... there was a thing in the trades about it (under a different title). I did a treatment... then the mini-major had a string of flops in a row... and went out of business. The producer still liked the idea, and wanted to set it up somewhere else at a fraction of the budget. I didn’t think this was the type of story that could be made on a limited budget - it travels all over the place - and voiced my opinion. The producer had me write up a new treatment - reflecting the budget. Um, this time the story didn’t really work. He wanted me to go to script, and the result wasn’t pretty. And wasn’t made. So I bought it back. Now I owned the worst version of this story possible. But it was a completed script. So I did a rewrite it years ago, with input from my wheeler-dealer lawyer who thought he knew what studios wanted. So, there was a helicopter chase, and lots of dumb explosions. That version of the script also did not sell - and was basically the low budget version with big expensive scenes glued on. So now I’m going to throw everything away and start from scratch - sure, some of the scenes will make their way back in, but probably half of the rewrite will be new material. The helicopter chase? Out!

But I’m not working on that rewrite this month - I’m doing the Hawaii script rewrite (since it shoots in September) and probably writing a family script that I have some people interested in.

The other scripts on the rewrite pile have problems ranging from story problems to bland ideas - many of these scripts have okay characters and scenes, but they don’t have a high concept or any real hook. They’re just average genre scripts - and no one wants an average script. So I’m looking to infuse them with some sort of fantastic hook or raise the stakes or graft on a high concept. I think I mentioned the dirty cop rewrite, THE DIVISION, which is an ancient script about police corruption. Before it was just about some bad cops and one good one... I saw SERPICO at a tender age. Well, two things are being added to that script - one is a real unsolved murder of a policeman I know about that is *really* strange, and the other is this weird idea that the bad cops form their own gang that takes on another gang... and anyone else who gets in their way. What if Al Capone in UNTOUCHABLES had been a high ranking cop - and all of his gang were cops? What do you do when the gangsters are cops? Who do you call? That’s not exactly a high concept, but it’s a hook. I’m really focusing on the idea of cops as gang members this time around - and trying to come up with some scenes you’ve never seen before in any previous cop movie. I’m puttering around on that one.

Another one I’m puttering around on was a typical urban crime film... Great characters and lots of cool plot twists and a couple of the best scenes I’ve ever written (oddly enough, a friend of mine who read this about 15 years ago mentioned one of the scenes a couple of days ago - he didn’t know I was rewriting it). The problem is - we’ve seen this one before. So I tried to find some way to make it unique... and thought about “recasting it in another genre” - what if it was sci-fi? What if it was a musical? What if.... Hell, what if they’re cowboys? I often joke about that - it was the worst note I ever got on a script: What if they’re cowboys? But I started to wonder what this urban crime film would be like if it took place in the modern west - maybe in New Mexico, which has great film incentives (so producers are looking for scripts that take place there). There was a Lee Marvin movie called PRIME CUT directed by the late, great Michael Ritchie, about the Kansas City Mob - they worked out of a slaughterhouse and when they killed a guy, they sent his family and friends hot dogs made from him. Yikes! Not a great movie, but hard to forget due to the hot dog thing.... and Sissy Spacek nekkid for most of the film’s running time. What if my urban crime story took place on ranches and cattle towns? You know, they did train robberies in westerns - what if I used trains in my crime story? Every scene changed - and that script is becoming something very different than any crime film you’ve seen in the past twenty years. Not a high concept, but really unusual. It has more personality than it ever had before.

Most often it’s a page one due to a high concept injection - I take the basic plotting and characters and overlay a new high concept. Easiest way to do this is to play with the stakes or the device used in the story, or just add a weird element... So one of the projects is called DEMON HUNTER (for now - I hate that title) and it used to be about a bodyguard and a woman pregnant with the President’s kid - and the President's people want her dead so that he can be re-elected. SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME meets what’s in Bill Clinton’s pants. This was pre-Clinton, and was kind of a JFK-like Prez and a non-movie-star type Marilyn Monroe. But there have to be a dozen movies like this now - from 1600 with Wesley Snipes (or, Prisoner #5462864 as he’s known now) to that Clint Eastwood movie where he witnesses the Prez kill a babe. I wrote this back when I didn’t understand that high concept isn’t just doing search and replace to make it The President or make the bad guys into Vampires or have the story take place In Outer Space. Though some of these rewrites are basically doing that - the best thing to do is to find a new high concept for the story... and the DEMON HUNTER story is *now* about the Vatican’s version of Indiana Jones who unearths the key to cracking a code in the Bible... and discovers that the second coming is about to take place - the Second Son will be born in a certain hospital on January 6th... So the archeologist jets to the hospital to find and protect the pregnant woman from Satan’s minions - who want to kill her before she gives birth. Various forms of demons attack (instead of The President’s handler's secret hit squad) and each form of demon is some cool kind of monster. I tried to make the demons all kind of high concept. Coming up with them was fun. And the new end twist - she gives birth, and it’s *Satan’s* son! Okay - kinda OMEN meets CONSTANTINE meets THE BODYGUARD... but much better than the stale script it began life as.

But that wasn’t the one I finished either - but I wrote FADE OUT on a new old script a few days ago, or maybe it’s an old new script. Whatever - it’s something else I can sell. Something to add to the inventory.

So now I’m back rewriting the script I’m *supposed* to be working on....

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Opening Scenes.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Fish Tacos at Islands in Burbank.

Movies: WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS - yes, I should have seen SPEED RACER, but the reviews were bad and it had a huge line... so I saw the chick flick. Which was an okay idea, but done so by the numbers that it was old before they made it. And, did they give Kutcher the haircut from NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN for a reason? Here’s the strange thing - I like Cameron Diaz... and she can only play one character, and she’s getting too old to play that character. When you see her in this film, she looks... well, her age... but she’s still playing Mary - the sweet ditz who *must* be shown in her underwear at least once in the film. The whole movie seems cobbled together from other films - including a whole segment lifted from MR. MOM of all films. The story idea - couple gets married while drunk then are forced to live together and eventually fall in love - was done much better back in 1928 by Buster Keaton in SPITE MARRIAGE. And I wonder why they didn’t just buy the rights to that film and remake it... with the Vegas thing instead of the rebound Broadway actress in the Keaton version. (The Keaton version is about a poor dry cleaner who gets accidentally married to a hot Broadway actress after she gets dumped by her star boyfriend... the Kutcher version is about a poor furniture maker who gets accidentally married to a hot businesswoman after she gets dumped by her CEO boyfriend.) (And in both versions, they are stuck married to each other.) The Keaton version is filled with all kinds of comedy that doesn’t seem like you’ve seen it ten times in the past year in other films.

Here’s a clip:



Okay, that's one scene (with new music added) and it's funnier than anything in WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS. Maybe I'll see SPEED tomorrow....

Pages: 6 pages to finish that rewrite (that I was plugging along on for a few days) - and nothing really for the past couple of days except notes on the Hawaii script.

Bicycle: Didn't ride Friday, but today (Sat) I did some riding and feel pretty good. About 20 blocks or so. My legs have grown to accept this torture... and I feel better. You know, the blood is, like, circulating!

- Bill

Back On The Chain Gang

Monday I finally bought a bicycle.

I used to bike all over the place - I never drove anywhere. If I had a meeting at Universal or Warner Bros or Disney, I’d bike there. Those studios are close to me, and when you drive there they put you in some guest parking structure about 10 miles from wherever your meeting is. If you bike, you can park right at the building where you are meeting. Right after Clint Eastwood took a golf club to some guy’s car who parked in his spot on the Warner’s lot, I had a meeting with the company next door (Weed Road) and purposely parked my bike in his parking spot. I was hoping he’s smash the hell out of my bike and I’d end up on the news... but that didn’t happen. Eastwood was shooting a movie somewhere. I would ride everywhere though - a friend of mine had a barbeque on the other side of the valley - I rode there. There was a dollar theater in Northridge - I’d ride there if they had some movie I wanted to see. These are insane bike rides for you folks out of town. But the most insane bike ride I ever took in Los Angeles wasn’t distance, it was danger - I rode into Hollywood a few times on the very narrow, very twisty, traveled by a zillion speeding cars *and* speeding busses, Cahuenga pass. You get clipped a half dozen times by car side mirrors! I did that.

Then, my bike got mangled and stolen... and I just drove everywhere. You know, it’s easy to do - get in the car and drive over the pass - and it’s your side mirror hitting the cyclists. Hey, man, that’s on Van Nuys Blvd - I’m gonna drive there (used to ride all the time). Hey, that’s in Burbank - I’m gonna drive there! (Used to ride to the movies in Burbank about twice a week - even in winter when it can get cold.) Never replaced the bike.... and eventually, Hey, Ralphs is half a block away... I’m going to drive to get groceries. I mean, carrying them is a lot of work. Next thing you know, I’m like the opening titles in whatever season of GET SMART had the Sunbeam Alpine ROARING... across the street and parking. I would drive down the street rather than walk...

And I got fat.

I mean, my job is sitting on my ass and typing all day. No exercise involved at all. My *fingers* get a work out, I guess. But that’s about it.

My blood doesn’t circulate, it just kind of sits there. This is not healthy.

So, a couple of years ago I decided to buy a bike and start riding again... but I never got around to buying the bike. I *did* decide to do more walking. I don’t drive a half block to the grocery store anymore, I walk. I also walk here and there - and every once in a while take a fairly long walk. A couple of weeks ago, I had a meeting in Toluca Lake, and walked there. That was a real walk! And it felt pretty good. The blood began circulating again. Some of it even got up to my brain - and I could think again! Hmmm, this exercise thing may be a good idea for my writing?

That was one of the great things about the bicycle - In the old days I would skip my local Starbucks and cycle to Priscilla’s in Toluca Lake - that was my office. I would write a few pages there, then get on the bike and ride into Burbank and work at the Coffee Bean on San Fernando near the movie theaters. The great thing about the ride in between was that I got the blood circulating and had time to think about the scene I was about to write. By the time I got into Burbank, I had dialogue and actions erupting from my brain - I had to lock the bike and open the laptop quickly to get all of that stuff typed up! This resulted in the most prolific period of my career - I wrote like a madman!

Now... well, I just don’t write as much. I’m lazy. I’m sloth-like. My blood doesn’t move at all. My brain doesn’t do much.

So, Monday, I bought a new bike.

The thing about bikes in Los Angeles - if you buy a really nice bike, you are probably buying it for someone else. When I first got here I had a really expensive bike... and it was stolen right away. They used a blow torch on the pole I locked it to. The LAPD told me this happens all the time - there are guys in trucks with blow torches cutting through chains and locks and even the poles you lock it to. I replaced that bike with the exact same expensive model - and it was also stolen. Eventually I bought the cheapest bike I could find - the basket cost as much as the bike - and that bike took much longer for them to steal. That became the plan from then on - buy a cheap bike, see how long it took them to steal it. Sometimes it was years! So, this new bike? Target. Cheap. A Schwinn SunTour.

Now, in my mind I’m a bicycle guy. In my mind I can ride from here to Northridge to see a movie. In my mind I can ride all the way across the valley. I got on the new bike, and rode it about 6-8 blocks home... and my legs felt like rubber. All of those muscles required to ride a bike? I don’t got them anymore. They went away when the fat came. I thought the walking might help - different muscles. The walking muscles have absolutely nothing to do with the bicycle muscles. I went to bed Monday night with throbbing legs. Tuesday, I rode 8 blocks... and thought my legs might explode. When I got off the bike, I almost landed on my head. My legs just did not want to work. They rebelled against me. Yesterday - 8 blocks... and my legs were a little better. Today - the plan is to ride *miles*. I’m typing this from Priscilla’s in Toluca Lake...

I’m not riding into Burbank, but I am riding home from here. And when that becomes “easy” I’m going to keep expanding the ride until I am in Burbank.

Hopefully my legs won’t give out on me.

- Bill

Children Of Scum - and Cutting Class

Last year I mentioned that I had a line in a friend’s short film, but I never told you what happened after that...

Here is the trailer for the short film (I'm the pizza guy):



But in the finished film, I am nowhere to be found. I got cut. The film showed at the Beverly Hills Short Festival a few weeks ago, and I showed up for the screening... and Danny (the writer-director) wondered why I was there - and apologized for about the 100th time for cutting me out of the film.

Now, I don’t know the reason why he cut me out of the film - maybe my performance sucked? But, my guess is that I was cut for time. When I first read the script, I thought - heck, I’m the punchline! The movie is a fake DVD extra for what has to be the worst film ever made - even though none of the people involved seem to know this - and the humor comes from the “stars” and creative team going on-and-on in interviews about how brilliant the film is, intercut with scenes of the really really bad movie. My character was *not* a member of the cast and crew... well, maybe the crew - I was a pizza delivery guy who delivered food to the set. So I was the easy cut for time... the difficult cut? One of the lead actors had this amazing speech that was silly on the page, and he made a million times sillier. This was one of the scenes from the bad film, and he did some amazing bad acting. It’s not easy to act that bad. On set, it was difficult not to laugh while he was doing the scene. It was hysterical... That scene was trimmed to the nubs. That was a huge loss.

My character could easily be cut for time, was kind of a silly character in the real life section of the film, and I think was also the only character who was in behind the scenes footage from the “past”... I was the easy and logical cut.

And, you know, compared to that actor who had us all trying not to laugh on set, my performance probably wasn’t all that hot.

I would have cut myself for time.

Frequently on message boards someone posts that they have a 137 page script and wonder why the evil powers that be don’t want scripts that long... and they have no idea how they can cut their masterpiece down to 110 pages. Well, the answer is, you have to cut it down. A screenplay is a *precision* document - and the reason why they want that 110 page script is because, using that ballpark page-per-minute guide, they need a film that can play every 2 hours with enough time in between showings to sweep out the popcorn and pry any shoes stuck to the floor with sticky soft drink residue. There’s a reason for it - and that means you need to cut your script.

You need to make tough decisions and creative decisions. You need to make sure everything in your script moves the story forward, is entertaining, and exposes character. If a character can be cut - cut it! If a scene can be cut - cut it! If a line of dialogue can be cut - cut it! It’s easy to become so attached to a line or character or scene that you can’t imagine cutting it - guess what? You still need to cut it!

I have had conversations with writers who have been told by a dozen people that a scene or character didn’t work - but they were fighting to keep it. Everyone they give their script to tells them that it’s too wordy... but they don’t want to trim it down. Everyone tells them some character serves no story purpose... but they refuse to cut that character. Everyone tells them something doesn’t work... but they don’t want to fix it. They were arguing to keep it. It’s like they were looking a second opinion that would agree with them. So they keep giving it to people... and they all say the same thing - the script needs work. They don’t want to make the changes, they would rather argue... and search for that one person in the world that agrees with them. That doesn’t solve the problem - they need to make the cuts, however painful those cuts may be.

If one person tells you something doesn’t work, that might just be that person’s opinion. But if everyone is saying the same thing, you need to take a look at that.

Also, there’s this great line from THE WILD BUNCH that says it’s not whether you give your word, it’s who you give it to... so not all feedback is equal. If your mom loves your script and someone in the business has problems with it, you might give more credence to the person in the business, no matter how much you love your mom.

It’s not about what works for you - it’s about what works for the script. Sometimes we hang on to some scene because we love that scene or maybe we’re just stubborn. But once we have written FADE OUT and let the script sit for a while and we’re going back to do the next draft, it’s time to look at the script *objectively* and make the hard choices that make it a better screenplay.

The first draft of my VOLATILE script had 8 tasks and several scenes with some funny interactions with other people... but the script was missing something, and I tore it apart and re-assembled it... and cut out 2 tasks (including my favorite) and all of the funny stuff that didn’t advance the story. Scenes I loved - gone. Some characters - gone. But the screenplay - a hundred times better - sleek, to the point. But if a bunch of people tell me the same thing is a problem with the current draft? I’m gonna fix it.

Would you rather have your script exactly the way you first wrote it, or the very best version of your story?

CHILDREN OF SCUM is playing at Mockfest in Hollywood on Saturday May 17th at 5 pm.

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Conflict and character
Yesterday’s Dinner: Sesame Chicken at City Wok in Studio City.

Movies: IRON MAN - best superhero movie I've seen since the first SPIDER-MAN. Great match of actor to role with Robert Downey jr's bad-boy image perfectly fitting the spoiled party boy Tony Stark. Film has to great emotional scenes right up front - including a romantic open heart surgery scene! This turns a "kid's film" into a "adult film". Stay until the end of the film or you'll miss Samuel L. Jackson's cameo!

Pages: Friday - 5 pages on a screenplay. Saturday - 8.5 pages on a screenplay. Sunday - 20 query letters and a pile of e-mails to producers.

Meetings & More Meetings

Meetings! One on the odd indie film project, one on a low budget horror thing (my script) with some friends, and one with a director about some of my action scripts. All of it is just talk for now, so I'll tell you when someone whips out a contract and checkbook.

PS: You know, I'm going to talk a bit more about this director looking for action scripts. I have never worked with this director, he's a friend of a friend and read one of my scripts about a year ago and really liked it. He just directed a high profile movie that will be released at the end of the year, and thinks that there will be some buzz on the project... and wants to be prepared. So he's looking for a bunch of potential projects for when opportunity knocks. If he gets a meeting and they are looking for an action project, he can pitch some of my scripts (and probably some other writers' scripts). He comes off looking like a guy with access to all kinds of great scripts.

But what's in it for me? Well, this soon-to-be-hot-director has all kinds of doors opening for him that may not be open for me, and all kinds of contacts that I don't have... and he's taking *my* scripts through those doors. And it's working the other way, too - if I find some project looking for a director, I'm going to suggest him (the hot director). Works for both of us.

This is the way you get your scripts out there... This is how you get your scripts to people you don't know... This is how you increase *your* contacts, because if these people love your script they will want to meet with you.

Part of our discussion was the ground rules for various scenarios - what happens if they love my script but don't think he's the right director? What if they hate my script but want him for something else? What kind of paperwork will we need to make sure neither of us gets screwed? If we both know where each are coming from and what we expect, there's less chance we will end up on People's Court or Cops. And the better the chance we can help each other.

The very first step in a deal like this is: you need scripts that people think will open doors for them. Scripts that they think can help advance *their* careers. This director may end up in some very impressive offices, and he wants to hand them a script that won't embarrass him.

Writing that script - that's the hard part. But once you have some great scripts, you want to get them out there so that they can open doors for you.


- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Dialogue Tips
Yesterday’s Dinner: Hawaiian BBQ Chicken at the Hawaiian BBQ place in Studio City.

Movies: THE FALL - or “When Production Designers Attack!” This film answers that question, whatever happened to the guy who made THE CELL? Back when that film came out, I posted somewhere that it was a beautiful film that made no sense. They took a cool idea that was kind of like DREAMSCAPE and so over-did the “dreams” that it completely overpowered the rest of the film... and then the story is set up so that when J-Lo goes into the dreams to find the missing person, it doesn’t matter! They find the missing person some other way, which makes the whole “dream” thing just a bog waste of time! Okay, THE FALL is actually a step forward - though the weird fantasy stuff still overpowers the rest of the film, the story kind of makes sense.

The movie is a cross between THE PRINCESS BRIDE and THE WIZARD OF OZ, and okay for kids (except an animal is killed in the story, and that might upset them... it almost made *me* cry). Story is set around 1915 has a cute little girl in the hospital with a broken arm from a fall, meets a silent movie stuntman paralyzed after an on screen fall. In order to get her to steal morphine for him (so that he can kill himself) he tells her a story, one chapter at a time, with her stealing pills in between. The story is a big adventure (with characters named after adventure writers) that evolves and changes the longer he tells it. But the story (by Dan Gilroy) doesn’t matter to director Tarsem - to him, it’s all about the visuals. Everyone wears weird hats. No setting is realistic - there’s a middle eastern city where all of the buildings are shades of blue. People wear masks - just for fun. When one character is killed, he is wrapped in a banner that stretches a hundred feet into the sky... and the red stain of blood creeps up the banner as we watch. Beautiful - and it all seems like they did it without any CGI.

The adventure story is about a group of very different outcasts seeking revenge against the evil ruler who has hurt all of them... and the characters in the fantasy are played by the same actors who are in the real world of the hospital (much like the OZ characters are the same as the people Dorothy knows in Kansas). Nothing in this fantasy adventure is realistic looking - everything is production designed to the limit. Colorful, strange... and beautiful. Also, distracting. Though the meat of the story is the impossibly cute little girl and the paralyzed stuntman in the hospital, this isn’t as important to Tarsem as the fantasy.

One great touch is when the stuntman is telling the story, one of the heroes is an Indian... and from the way he tells it, he means a Native American... but the little girl imagines a man from India. This creates some humor. I don’t know if a young audience, who may love the fantasy elements, will want to sit through the production design for the sake of production design scenes that are all about art and *not* about story... but if they can keep from kicking the chair in front of them, they may like it. I still think the best thing to do with guys like Tarsem is to not let them rewrite the script and even *force them* to shoot the story as written... with their unusual style. That way we get a story that makes sense, where the scenes are about the story rather than the “art”, but we still get that strange vision (just in service of the story). If you think of this film as a trip to the art gallery rather than a story, you’ll love it.

Movies: HAROLD & KUMAR ESCAPE - The Arclight Cinemas in Los Angeles are the cream of the crop - no commercials, no one seated after the film starts, assigned seats, and they have a restaurant and bar and gift shop on site. They also cost more than other cinemas, but with ticket prices going up every few months, the difference isn’t as much as it used to be. I used to only go there for special screenings (they often have writers or directors or cast for Q&A afterwards, when Ted & Terry did a screening of SHREK I was the guy interviewing them afterwards), but now I might see something there if it’s convenient. After Fango wrapped, my friend Rod wanted to see HAROLD & KUMAR ESCAPE, and it was playing at the Arclight... at one of their cocktail showings. They have special showings where you can bring drinks from the bar into the cinema. Cool.

I ran a Script Tip about pairing characters with their opposites to bring out drama a few weeks ago, and that also works for comedy. The film starts a few minutes after the previous film ended, with Harold taking a shower (he’s the neat freak of the two) and being interrupted by Kumar being very noisy on the toilet (not the neat one). This gives us everything we need to know about these guys - and as the story progresses, the differences between them will be a source of drama and story and comedy. The film sets up *fast* with them hopping a plane to Amsterdam, marijuana capitol of the world, so that Harold can catch up with the woman he loves. But on the plane, while Harold is being the perfect passenger, Kumar is in the bathroom trying out his smokeless bong. Things go wrong, the bong is mistaken for a bomb (and no matter how many times Kumar says “It’s a bong!” he is misunderstood) and the two end up in Guantanamo Bay Prison with all of the other terrorists. That’s in the opening few minutes of the film. Then they escape, and end up on a journey to Texas where Kumar’s ex-girlfriend is marrying a rich @ssh@ole who has enough government connections to get them out of trouble.

Kal Penn and John Cho have great chemistry together - they’re the Hope and Crosby of the stoner set - and *are* these characters. We usually see Cho in comedies, but Penn has shown his dramatic acting chops in movies like THE NAMESAKE and on 24 - and it’s hard to believe that the same serious dramatic actor is this silly stoner. Time for someone to give Cho a big meaty role so that we can say the same about him.

The film seems like they shot a rough draft of the script - often there are scenes that seem to be filled with potential humor, but they just scratch the surface. Here’s an example - at one point the two find themselves (like many ethnic comedy characters before them) stuck at a Klan rally wearing sheets and hoods. There are a million possible gags here, but as soon as they get swept up in the group, the hoods are removed! Hey, they got the funny situation, but they forget to milk it for jokes! They don’t even try to stretch out the uncomfortable situation - the Klan guys are supposed to tell what terrible thing they did to a minority today, and they *start* with Kumar! Would have been a better scene if they *ended* with the two imposters, because every other Klan guy’s story would be a build (and laugh) to what our imposters would say.

The film does a great job of making fun of ethnic stereotypes - presenting a character in such a way that *we* jump to a conclusion about them, then exposing who they really are. A Homeland Security Agent hot on their trail jumps to stereotype conclusions we would never even consider - a scene in the trailer has him using a translator to interrogate Harold and Kumar’s typical middle class parents... who only speak English.

One thing that really didn’t work in the film was the guy playing President Bush. You know, we see the President of TV all the time and know exactly what he looks like and sounds like, so when an actors plays him, it doesn’t work very well... and the longer that actor is on screen, the less it works. Here we have a *long* scene with a fake W, and the more he’s on screen, the less the scene works.

Even though they missed a bunch of jokes, the film was still kind of entertaining (of course, I’d had a couple of beers) and Neil Patrick Harris is great at playing a drugged out whoring version of himself... stay for the post end credit sequence that deals with his character!

Pages: Mostly getting caught up on my sleep from Fango, and meetings.
- Bill

Welcome To Fango 2008!

Every once in a while when I’m doing my Horror Class, someone asks me why I feel qualified to teach about horror screenwriting. Fair question. When you look at my credits, it’s mostly action and thriller films, with that odd family comedy. But NIGHT HUNTER started out as horror action (until it was stripped of the horror part) and I have written a bunch of horror scripts that didn’t get made (though a couple got really close - and I was once up for a HALLOWEEN sequel). I’m a horror movie fan, and one of my first scripts was about an OMEN homage about a Satanic cult made up of Pacific Gas & Electric executives who brought death and destruction to anyone who opposed their nuclear power plant plans for Point Arena, California. I have been attending the Fangoria weekend Of Horrors for about 15 years, now - and if you ever bought any of the behind the scenes of horror movies video series called THE DEAD BEAT, check the opening credits... I was one of the three principals behind that series.

If you aren’t familiar with Fango - it’s the magazine for horror movie fans, run by Tony Timpone, and every year in Los Angeles (and other major cities) they have a convention where horror movie stars and horror movie makers interact with fans. When I first began going, it was at one of the LAX hotels, then they moved to the Burbank Hilton, and this year they moved to the Los Angeles Convention Center downtown.

Horror movie fans have changed over the years - when I first began going to Fango, it was 95% geek guys and 5% geek gals and wives who didn’t understand. Then, a few years ago, Goth happened... and now probably over a third of the audience are goth gals covered with tattoos wearing really hot outfits. And last year at Burbank there seemed to be more crossover - with mainstream film fans joining the audience. Part of that is due to horror being hot right now - every couple of weeks there is a new horror film in cinemas - and movie stars are often in these films. For a while, there, horror was a ghetto, and the movies starred people mainstream audiences have never heard of.

When they announced that Fango was moving to the Convention Center, my first response was - Where will we drink? Where will we eat? The Convention Center is in a section of downtown surrounded by an area where you don’t want to park your car. For all the talk about rebuilding downtown, there aren’t really any places to eat... and the bars are scary. There are a couple of hotels in walking distance, but on site the only place to eat is the Convention Center cafeteria - where I paid $9.50 for the worst hamburger I have ever eaten in my life... and I can’t figure out how you can screw up a hamburger. My friend Regent bought a salad he said tasted weird - chemically - so they are able to screw up salads as well as burgers. The 99 cent burger at Carl’s Jr is a million times better than that $10 Convention Center burger...

But I’m getting ahead of myself....

The reason for Fango going to the Convention Center - last year they had to turn people away at Burbank. It was crowded. To get your ticket, you had to stand outside in the heat for hours in a line that stretched around the hotel. Once inside - you might have to stand in back to hear Guellermo del Toro talk - and the dealer’s room was really a whole bunch of rooms... a main room and a half dozen smaller rooms. The show needed more room. But when I arrived on Friday, there was no real line for tickets - maybe a dozen people compared to the hundreds last year. Strange.

Events like this used to have the weekend pass and the day pass, but now they have Gold Passes (first five rows for all panels and free autographs) and Silver Passes (next ten rows and something) and Preferred Pass (next five rows) and then the weekend and day passes... so the Weekend Pass isn’t on a lanyard anymore, it’s a wrist band like the day passes... but you wear it for all 3 days. Meaning - you shower with it. This is not convenient. In fact, it’s kinda gross.

So I wander into the auditorium for the opening ceremony - and it’s empty. It looks *really* empty, because it’s so big, and because there are only a couple dozen people in the first 20 rows. You’re sitting in row 21, and there are hundreds of seats in front of you that you are not allowed to sit in. Maybe it will fill up on Saturday?

They show a bunch of trailers - including Indiana Jones and Ironman and some other non-horror films that appeal to the horror crowd... then the trailers change to low budget horror films that you’ve never heard of. I open up my program to see who the guests are this year... and wonder if I’ve been given a program from 15 years ago by mistake. Okay, there’s Clive Barker - he’s there every year. And Reggie Bannister from PHANTASM. And David Naughton from AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. And the cast of the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. And Tony Todd from CANDYMAN. And Angus Scrimm from PHANTASM. And Gunnar Hanson from the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. And... well, a bunch of other people from the past. Plus a bunch of panels from low low budget horror movies (some backyard productions) and the crew from FEAST to talk about 2&3 and “The Girls Of Moonlight” and... well, no one from a studio horror film. No panels from a single film with a budget over $2 million. What the heck is going on here?

So on Saturday and Sunday - all of those front rows were still mostly empty. And no one thought it might be a good idea to get rid of some of the empty Gold & Silver & Premium rows so that they place didn’t look like a ghost town, and those of us who had paid the standard $60 to get in weren’t so far back that we needed binoculars.

They always have a screening room at Fango, that shows a mix of “classic” horror film from the 80s and new films getting a sneak (not uncommon for someone like Frank Darabont to bring his new movie and the Fango crowd gets to see it before anyone else)... that was upstairs at the Convention Center... and the escalator was not on. Took until Sunday afternoon before someone switched it on! So you had to climb the stairs to get to the screening room... which was about the size of the last screen in that multiplex in BACHELOR PARTY. Okay, maybe not that small - but about 30-50 seats. That ended up not really being an issue for two reasons - nobody came to Fango this year, and the movies they were showing were all low low budget crap. The only “classic” film was THE DEAD PIT (most of you have never heard of this film) - which was made on a very very low budget in the Bay Area with my late friend Curt Wells on the FX crew. It was direct to video. Not quite in the same league as the usual “classic” films they’ve shown in the past.

I ventured into the Dealer’s Room, which was where the action was - instead of a main room and satellite rooms you may never even know exist, one big room. The good news for dealers was that they were all more or less equal (though David Naughton had an autograph table in the very back of the room facing the wall - most people probably never got back that far) it also exposed the number of tables for single films - movies made in someone’s backyard that they were selling on DVD at Fango. And this year there seemed to be a new type of dealer - people selling sex. There were pin up calenders and photos and even a T shirt place had a stripper pole and dancers to help advertize their wares. Usually Fango is kind of a family friendly event - even though there are companies selling crawling severed arms and scary masks and props from horror films, the “tween” kids are a big part of the horror movie audience. I was into horror movies as a 13 year old boy. I think part of the reason for this is that kids at that fragile age feel stronger if they can conquer and control their fears, and horror movies allow them to do this. But this year the dealer’s room was filled with strippers and girls with their asses hanging out - and lots and lots of boobs in tiny tiny bikini tops. Now, these things probably also interest 13 year old boys (they interested me at 13), but not with mom & dad standing next to them. And mom & dad don’t really want their kids to see this stuff. I kept thinking that in the old venue, they could have had a PG-13 main dealer’s room with some R rated satellite rooms. Here, you couldn’t avoid the asses hanging out. Even for boys older than 13, it was, um, distracting.

The first row of the dealer’s room was supposed to be the prime real estate... but the traffic tended to flow forward, down the center aisle. So you had to remember to go back and look at the 8 Films To Die For booth and the Anchor Bay booth. Studios - not here this year!

The only thing crowded was the literature table - which was way too small for all of the junk on it. Usually there are give away mini posters and post cards for all kinds of films and services... but this year the table was half the size with twice the junk. Lots of xeroxed movie posters and fliers, and post cards for websites for films that don’t exist... yet. One of the days there was an avalanche of junk, and mini posters and postcards flowed onto the floor. Swell!

On Saturday night we all walked down to the Holiday Inn’s bar and had several drinks. For no apparent reason, actress Tiffany Shepis (NIGHTMARE MAN) sat on my lap at one point. We’re friends, but any time a hot actress sits on my lap is worth mentioning. A fist fight broke out in the bar, and the hotel’s security guy stepped in to break it up... which resulted in the security guard fighting one of the guys... and they fought through the lobby to the elevator banks... and when one elevator door opened, the guy knocked the security guard into the elevator... and then moved in to continue the fight... then the elevator doors closed over them. I kept watching the elevators for one or the other to come down, but when the elevators doors opened, other guests exited. Obviously the two were fighting on some floor up there. Maybe a half hour later, the elevator doors opened and the messed up security guard stepped out. This was like something out of a movie.

Most of the rest of the event was kind of dull, the high points being a panel with Joe Dante and Robert Picardo (from THE HOWLING and many other movies that are favs of mine... even though Joe hasn’t done a feature since 2003's LOONEY TUNES movie) and George Romero and the cast & crew of the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD - lots of great behind the scenes stories, including that Duane Jones (Ben) hadn’t been written as African American, he was just the best actor they auditioned... and when Martin Luther King, jr was assassinated they realized that life had mirrored the end of their film... making it more topical than they had intended (the Viet Nam War was always part of the film’s background). These were the highpoints of the 3 days.

So they have this big venue, and nada. Why not have side-bar classes on writing horror and directing horror and make up and FX stuff? There was room for it. I have volunteered to Tony to do my horror class for free every year. Since they had the trailers for Indiana Jones and those other big films with cross-over, why not have a guest speaker or panel from those to bring in a larger crowd? I’ll bet you could get the screenwriter of the new Indiana Jones movie to speak (no one ever asks screenwriters to do anything, and I’ve seen David Koepp speak at other events) and we’re in the publicity push for IRONMAN, so someone could have shown up from that. Why not try to bring in the mainstream audience with big summer tentpole movies... and treat them to the world of horror flicks?

Why not show better movies in the screening room? A couple of years ago someone passed my zombie script to a low budget producer who called me, wanting to buy it... but he was making films for pocket change, and offered me even less than he should have (so I turned it down)... then made a zombie film that seemed *very* similar to mine called EVILUTION. So I figured I’d watch it and see if it was worth suing his @ss over... but after 20 minutes I left the screening room *screaming*!

It was that bad.

The scene where the gang members introduce themselves to the lead in a stilted exposition dump that seemed more like reading character bios from the casting notice than conversation is an example of this film's *terrible* writing.

Suing them would be an insult to my script.

I’m really not sure the idea of *anyone* being able to make a movie is a good thing. I mean, in theory it’s great that anyone can just make a movie... but shouldn’t they try to learn how first? This was a terrible script, terrible acting, terrible direction. Guess what? You can learn how to do all of those things - I have a website where you can learn about screenwriting for *free* and there are places to learn about directing and acting and how to deal with actors. Why not do some plays with community theater to get a handle on how actors think? Why not prepare *before* you make the film? And why don't producers who have no idea what good writing is, *stop rewriting scripts*? I've said this before, but there are lots of low budget producers in this biz who can take a script that might have sold for $500k and turn it into a movie that isn't even worth half that.

One of the strange things about this Fango was that it seemed incestuous - horror movies made by fans for fans seems like a good idea, but it seemed like they were rejecting the studio films completely... which leads to a program of low budget stuff that seems like it was cobbled from pieces of other movies. There was a comedy film they showed clips from that starred all of the people from 80s horror movies doing in-jokes that only fans of 80s horror films would get. This *limits* the audience. Why not try to expand the audience?

Maybe next year they’ll figure it out...

- Bill.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: How You Tell The Story
Yesterday’s Dinner: Tomato-Beef at City Wok in Studio City.

Movies: I'll talk about them in the next post.

Score Card For Mid-April

SCORECARD...

Monster movie assignment script - finished, delivered, and preparing for notes and rewrites. Shoots in a couple of months.

Family script from my treatment - dead... but the director likes it and wants to know if he can try to set it up elsewhere. Sure, why not? Odd Update: Seems it ain't quite dead! Someone else at the same company read it, loved it, and passed it over to production... so it still may happen.

That action project I tried to convert into an assignment - probably dead. No money, no contract... and the Producer doesn’t seem to be interested enough to call or e-mail and ask what’s going on.

Art house assignment - weird story idea from the producer, we’re still talking about it. May go next month.

Two specs that had traveled up the development chain... died. In one case, they thought it opened slow, in the other I have no idea what happened. Note to self: Always open script with naked women and explosions, no matter what the genre.


Next up - hopefully I finally get around to revising the damned book. Plus, some other specs are out there being read by folks. Who knows what will happen.

And, there's a mystery project I'm keeping hush-hush: It will either completely change my career... or may just be a lot of nothing.

-Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: How Stories Unfold
Yesterday’s Dinner: Pizza in Burbank.

Movies: SUPERHERO MOVIE - Needed to be 17% funnier. (just joking Craig)

Made single-handedly by Craig Mazin over at Artful Writer. He wrote, directed, produced, and plays a janitor. Of course, that doesn’t stop the end credit roll from being about 25 minutes of a 85 minute movie. You may think I’m joking, but this is the shortest movie with the longest end credit crawl I have ever seen. Of course, there are out takes in the end credits. Not just a couple of minutes of flubs, but whole scenes - some with stars that aren’t in the main body of the film! There may be a good 20 minutes of scenes! And most are pretty good - the whole scene with Woolverine having problems wiping his butt and Toilet Paper Hand Man coming to the “rescue” was just as funny as anything else in the movie.

And that gives you an idea of the type and level of humor in this film. Mostly a parody of SPIDER-MAN, with nerdy Rick Riker living with his aunt (Marion Ross) and uncle (Leslie Neilsen) after his parents (Robert Hays - great to see him in a ZAZ movie again! and Nicole Sullivan) are murdered (in a flashback from BATMAN BEGINS). Pretty much, scene-for-scene we get the SPIDER-MAN story, though this time it’s a dragonfly.

Rick keeps bumping into other superheroes from other movies, and here’s where the film could have been 17% funnier. Instead of some parody of the superhero, we get the actual superhero (played by some other actor) and some gag. So the Human Torch from Fantastic 4 catches fire and can’t put himself out... but they could have done that gag *and* found a funny variation on the Human Torch character. Storm is just Storm. Professor Xavier works well because he’s *not* the comic book character - he’s Tracy Morgan with no shortage of attitude and a wife (parody movie regular Regina Hall) who seems like she just stepped out of a Tyler Perry movie... oh, and she’s sure he’s been sleeping with Invisible Girl (Pamela Anderson - who, it must be noted, has unrealistically large breasts). They have a half dozen little bald kids in wheelchairs with super powers. These are funny things to do with the superhero characters - and I wish they’d done more with the actual superheroes they used (what if Human Torch was Gay?) or made them parody characters *like* actual superheroes, but with slightly different powers or personalities.

The plot is also too normal - I mean, Lex Luthor in the first SUPERMAN movie had a funnier evil plan! And when you add all of those old TV series like CAPTAIN NICE and MR. TERRIFIC, which had silly plots like bridges made of oatmeal and lines like Alice Ghostly’s response to her son admitting he does something that birds do, “Should I spread newspaper on the floor?” (NICE was from the creative team that gave us GET SMART, including Buck Henry!). Those shows had *funny* plots. SUPERGEO MOVIE has a villain who must kill one a day to stay alive.

SUPERHERO MOVIE has no shortage of fart jokes. In fact, every fart joke was used in the movie - there are none in the 20 minutes (or whatever) of closing credit materials. Marion Ross gets the majority of flatulence... and she’s combustible for an entire scene. When the odor gets so bad that our hero brings out a scented candle so his girlfriend can breathe, we can see the joke coming from a mile away... and that’s okay! It builds up suspense and anticipation. This probably adds a few laughs before the blue flame shoots across the room.

And, with that folks, I think I’m going to draw this review to a close. Funny if you like that kind of stuff (um, I do) and much better than most of the BLANK MOVIEs (the non-Zucker ones). Oh, and they recycle that ejector chair gag from, I think, the second NAKED GUN movie. And one guy did all of it.

- Bill

Chuckles Heston - RIP

I met Charlton Heston back when they did the re-release of TOUCH OF EVIL, interviewed him for my article on the restoration of the film. It was a strange experience - he was an old man. He looked old. He acted old. Completely different than the Heston I grew up watching on screen in cheesy movies and Biblical epics. As a kid, I saw him in EXODUS and BEN HUR and other big films that played on TV on holidays. When you’re a kid who is a complete introvert and loves movies, Holidays are often a mine field of relatives you see once or twice a year, plus the rest of the family, and it gets boring fast. But, if part of the holidays might include some big Biblical film where Heston races chariots and women wear filmy clinging clothes... well, that can turn a boring evening with relatives into something exciting. And Heston was the strong, powerful, take no BS hero in all of these films. I never really thought Jewish leader Moses was a kick-ass tough guy until I saw Heston play him.... he didn’t seem like that in Sunday school lessons.



A little later, Heston became the first Ah-nuld - playing the macho bad-ass heroes in sc-fi films. “Get your stinking paws off me you damned dirty ape!” PLANET OF THE APES was one of my favorite movies - saw it on TV as a kid and the twist end blew my mind. And Moses sure could kick monkey butt! After that Heston kicked butt in SOYLENT GREEN and OMEGA MAN and other cool films from my childhood. He also starred in another of my favorite films from childhood - THE NAKED JUNGLE (about an army of fire ants... coming right at us!). He made all kinds of great films, or, at least entertaining ones. He was also in two great western films, MAJOR DUNDEE and WILL PENNY. And who could forget him as the macho lady’s man football player in NUMBER ONE and the pilot in AIRPORT 75 (my favorite in the series) and the cop in TWO MINUTE WARNING?

But Heston turned into a grumpy old man - NRA President and right wing politics. That stuff was always there - it’s part of his tough-but-religious characters. I didn’t agree with his politics, but it was cool to see him and Ah-nuld in TRUE LIES.

So, when I was preparing to interview him, I came up with some hard ball gun questions about hunting weapons and self defense weapons and MAC-10s and other machine guns... but when I sat down at the table with him, he was somebody’s great grandfather *and* that actor who had been in so many films from my childhood. A nice guy, trying to find the best answers to questions about a film he made as a fairly young man - TOUCH OF EVIL. Who could remember back that far? Yet he tried to give complete answers and come up with interesting stories about the film. Instead of hardball questions, I told him how much I loved NAKED JUNGLE as a kid. You always worry that when you say you were a kid when you saw it on some Saturday afternoon TV showing decades after it was new you’re going to make him feel old. But he thanked me, and then it was the next reporter’s turn.

In retrospect, I think Heston was an underrated actor. He did all kinds of movies, all kinds of characters, and even if they did all look and sound like Heston (in TOUCH OF EVIL he played a Mexican police detective... who sounded just like Heston and looked like Heston after a tanning booth accident), he gave every role a feeling of strength and determination. He made Moses into an action hero. What other actor could have done that?

No one will ever be able to replace Charlton Heston - he will be missed.

- Bill

Philippe De Broca

One of my favorite directors. Died in 2004... last film directed in 2004.

You know how Madonna doesn't need a last name? There was probably a ten year period where De Broca was famous enough in the USA that he didn't need a first name. Trailers just said "DeBroca" and that was enough.

I probably first heard his name from my parents - and we aren't talking about people who saw movies in art houses while wearing black berets and reading Camus, here. My parents are normal people. They saw normal movies. De Broca made a film in the mid-60s called THAT MAN FROM RIO - a funny spy film - that was a huge hit in the USA. I don't mean an arthouse hit, I mean a mainstream hit. It was a funny James Bond kind of thing when those films were really popular - a globe hopping adventure story. So, when it was on NBC Monday Night At The Movies (or whatever) they watched it. And I watched it... and it's my kind of movie. (When was the last time a dubbed foreign language movie played on network TV?)

So it was one of my favorite movies on TV, and some of his other movies were also on TV (he was a famous director back then) and eventually I saw one of his films, Le MAGNIFIQUE, on my own in a cinema... And became a huge fan all over again. MAGNIFIQUE is about a writer of spy novels who ends up involved in a real life spy story... but, he's just a writer! Now, all of the kinds of things he creates for fiction he must live as fact in order to survive.

Though this film wasn't a huge hit like THAT MAN, it didn't only play in big cities... it played in my home town. Maybe a semi-wide release kind of thing.

This was followed up by a couple of movies that I think were major cities only - so I have to drive to see them: DEAR DETECTIVE, a comedy cop movie that's part rom-com, and the sequel (title I do not remember) that takes the same two characters on a new case. And then he kind of disappeared from US cinemas. Still making movies in France, we just weren't getting them. He made some films a bit later that played art houses and I saw them, but he wasn't famous anymore.

The film I left out is the one that probably made him most famous - and the one I watched on DVD last night... KING OF HEARTS starring Alan Bates and, I think, Geneveive Bujold's first movie. It's an anti-war comedy, made in the late 60s with a British star... and kind of became an anti Viet Nam War film. Probably wasn't even intended as such. Has a strange history, because when it came out in the 60s, it flopped big time. Big time. It killed DeBroca's career... But a strange thing happened during the Viet Nam War, it started popping up in college area cinemas. And was one of those movies that was playing *somewhere* up until 1975 when the war ended. In fact, there was one cinema that played it non-stop for *over five years* until the Viet Nam War was over. First time I saw it was at the UC Theater in Berkeley... and it played *somewhere* in Berkeley through the 70s... and brought back DeBroca's career in the USA.

Story is a comedy that takes place in France in WW1. The German army has taken over a town in France, but when they see a larger group of British soldiers (actually Scottish - kilts are funnier) approaching, they decide to evacuate... but hide a booby trap bomb in the town that will explode at midnight and kill the Scottish soldiers and their commanders. The next day the Germans plan to return and re-take the town from any survivors.

Well, a French underground guy radios the Scottish army and tells them about this plan... but tells them about it in French. So things get lost in translation. And the bomb is set to go off at midnight... and the town has a beautiful ornate clock in town square where a mechanical knight in armor comes out to strike the midnight bell with his mace. This information really loses something in translation - nobody knows what it means.

So the Scottish send in a man to disarm the bomb before they occupy the town. Since none of the demolitions guys speak French, they send in Alan Bates - a communications officer. A geek. A non-heroic guy.

Once he finds the bombs, they will either send in a demo guy or have a demo guy talk Bates through disarming the explosives.

Well, the whole town evacuates because if the bomb.
And they leave the gates to the asylum open.
And the crazy people venture out, don clothes of the townspeople, and kind of have a looney-bin holiday.

And when Bates enters the town, well... the people are acting strange. And that's the set up. The rest of the movie compares the crazy people to the soldiers & the war... and guess which is crazier? And Bates has to figure out why the townspeople are strange, then figure out where the explosives are, then stop them from blowing up, then decide if this crazy-world is more sane than the war around it...

And he falls in love with Bujold in the process, and is crowned King of the crazy people.

The movie is charming. Not laugh outloud funny. What used to be called a "gentle comedy". It's kind of like going to the circus (hey, Bujold does tight-rope walking on power lines in a scene, and there are lions and bears!) - it's also a beautiful film... really well shot. Hard to tell if it holds up - since it's already a period film, it can't really be dated. But it's a gentle film... kind of the anti-Michael Bay. And it still charmed me.

The last film of his I saw was ON GUARD, which actually got a wide release a few years before DeBroca died. A THREE MUSKETEERS kind of thing filled with sword fights and action and romance... about a female sword fighter tracking down the villains who killer her father, and finding love along the way.

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Fast & The Furious *is* No Man’s Land *is* Point Break
Yesterday’s Dinner: Sausage pizza on honey wheat at CPK on Sunset.

Movies: Two Number Movies...

10,000 BC. - Completely silly movie... but much better than it needed to be. Some people are complaining that it’s not historically accurate... well, duh! The thing was made by Roland Emmerich, the guy who had aliens building the pyramids in STARGATE and time travelers zooming around from present day to pyramid time. He’s wacky! He mixes up time periods for fun. And here we get sabertooth tigers and Egyptian Pyramids and anything else Roland wants to put in the film. Story is kind of lifted from APOCALYPTO - a cave dude who is reluctant to lead has the girl he loves stolen by evil dudes - probably to be sacrificed - so he and his worst enemy and a village elder and some tag-along kid go to get her back. They manage to walk across the world, meeting all kinds of folks from all kinds of time periods - from African tribesmen to Egyptians to, well, an alien dude building pyramids (not Jaye Davidson - which would have been a cool in0joke and cameo). Here’s the thing about Roland - he knows how to make a cheesy movie. This film has some big emotional moments, and some amazing magical moments (the red birds) and lots of CGI spectacle stuff. And the film has a *scope* - Roland makes films for the big screen - he may not have the talent of David Lean, but he steals lots of shots from LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. When characters cross the desert, you get to see the whole damned desert! This film reminded me of a Conan movie or an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. If you're in the mood for a big dumb epic adventure - it's okay. Just check your brain at the door.

21 - Based on a true story... which probably wasn’t as boring as this film. This thing seemed like the rough first draft of a script, complete with placeholders scenes, We start out with some tin-ear dialogue - awful OTN stuff. Story has whiter-than-white college kid at MIT who *dreams* of going to Harvard Med. That’s his motivation - he has this dream. He doesn’t want to be a doctor to help people or be a doctor to cure cancer or be a doctor to make lots of money... he just dreams of going to Harvard Med. He seems to have no goal after he graduates from Harvard Med. He has these two fake friends, who seem like place holders for characters to be created later. They are generic nerds, who have a generic science project.... and here’s the thing - they look completely different than our hero. He’s a handsome guy, they are chubby nerdy guys. So you *know* that he’s going to dump them and move up. Our hero works at a retail job in a clothing store... that is pure hell. Except, it’s not. We see him goofing off in the back room, and his job is dealing with upscale people buying upscale clothes. When I worked at Safeway Grocery, they would send me to other stores to fill in for people on vacation sometimes... and no matter how much seniority I had at my store, in the other stores I was the guy they gave the crap jobs to - and that usually meant cleaning the public restrooms, and *actual* crap job. I scrubbed toilets. That’s the kind of job you learn to dislike. That’s the kind of job that makes you say “Yes” when someone asks if you’d like to do something on the fringe of illegal. But he’s got a nice, clean job selling upscale suits. It’s a bland job.

For a moment, you think there may be some kinky twist when our hero seems to flirt with an older diner waitress - and he says he’s coming home with her.. But then we figure out she’s his mother. It was a bad way to introduce her... but after that, his relationship with his mom? Bland. She loves and supports him... no drama, nothing interesting - she’s kind of a generic, place holder character.

Kevin Spacey, who produced this film, plays the MIT professor who brings our hero onto his team of card counters who fly to Vegas on weekends to make lots of money. Our hero says he’s only interested in making enough to pay for Harvard Med, then he quits. The other members on the team are all place holders - they have no characters. Sure, one is a klepto, and one is a pretty boy and one likes to wear wigs... but none of these are *characters* - they are sketches. Kate Boswell plays the girl - and that’s pretty much what her role is. Our hero has the hots for her, and there are scenes where they talk for a moment and this is supposed to show the relationship progressing... and eventually she invites him to a comped room in Vegas, and you’re thinking - they have no relationship at all! We know *nothing* about her - in fact, we know so little about her that I thought for a while she might be Spacey’s daughter. They don’t have anything in common, other than they’re in the same movie and on the same card counting team, but why doesn’t she hook up with one of the other guys? Or Spacey? So our hero goes up to her room, and they kiss in front of a penthouse window overlooking Vegas.... but they have no conversation! They have no characters! Afterwards, they don’t act like slept together - they treat each other like strangers... which is pretty much how they treated each other before. It’s bland. No drama. No real characters. It’s a placeholder scene - an outline of a scene, but not the scene.

Also in Vegas, we have the place holder for a villain, played by Larry Fishburne... who seems like he belongs in some other movie - some 1950s mob flick. He’s a cliche leg breaker... but in modern Vegas. Completely out pf place! They keep trying to find ways to Scotch tape him into the story - but he seems like he stumbled in from other film. Since card counting is not illegal, just frowned upon, they needed some physical threat - and that’s Fish. He beats people up just for fun - because modern Vegas isn’t mobbed up anymore.

The film just goes through the motions, ticking off scenes until they reach the running time... but none of it adds up to anything. The characters seem like sketches, there is no drama, there is no actual conflict, and we don’t care. The film has no “juice” - we fell nothing at all. There is no suspense or mystery or romance or excitement or anything. One character says “In Vegas you can be anybody” - except none of these people live a fantasy life. Sure, they put on wigs or moustaches and go to strip clubs - but they don’t live any fantasy. They just play cards.

Eventually Spacey gets to say, “You know what I’m capable of!” as a threat... but we don’t know what he’s talking about, so it’s an empty threat - even a silly threat.

And they come to the end of the list of scenes and we get closing credits... but I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t care... and I didn’t really believe any of these people or events ever existed, even though it’s based on a true story.

Every scene of your screenplay, you should know - what do you want the audience to feel? And how are you making them feel that? If they aren’t feeling anything, they are just sitting there... wondering when the damned movie is going to be over.

Pages: Finished the script, delivered it... and had a meeting on another potential assignment. And this blog entry... and some other stuff.